IE7 Extinguishes Firefox in Printing
February 8, 2006 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
The IEBlog gives in great detail the newest features and functionality to printing in IE7. A statement that I felt was interesting was…
Internal studies showed that printing is the second most used feature after navigation in a browser and traditionally has not seen the respect it deserves.
Do you agree? 2nd most used feature? I hardly ever print from my browser. I actually try not to print much of anything at all. Why would I do this? Maybe I don’t because of the problems that IE7 has now fixed. Do you print from your browser alot?
Two of the features mentioned that are added to IE7 printing functionality are:
- Shrink to Fit
- Orphan Control
Both of which help tackle that challenge of wasting all that white space around the margins of the screen you’re looking at. There’s no margins on the site itself, why must I print one?
Another feature is that as soon as you enter the print preview function, you immediately see a scaled version of the entire page as it will print. This is regardless of the size or scaling of the window itself. It automatically fits itself in the window to give you a quick review if the print will give you what you want.
Next is “Live Margins”. As you look at your preview, you can dynamically resize the margins by dragging the guide lines and see the impact to your printed page. This allows you to even further define the amount of whitespace displayed or content allowed on the page before printing.
The last item discussed “Print Selection” was capable in previous versions of IE, but wasn’t quite as intuitive. Now, if you right-click on content in a webpage and choose “Print”, the “Print Selection” checkbox is already chosen for you in the print dialog, PLUS you have all the preview functions available in the normal print page options.
Nice work! Maybe I’ll start printing more, guess I should go by replacement ink cartridges now.
Source: IE7 Printing: An Experience You Won’t Want To Miss via Digg
People print web pages to quickly get info they need to hang onto for later, like maps and driving directions. It’s rare that pages are printed for formal use requiring more formatting. Apples methods are better: less means more. Don’t bombard us with features, instead just give us what we want easily.
I was always caught between browsers’ inherrent printing shortcomings. I’m a huge fan of printing selected text simply because you almost NEVER need to print an entire webpage.
IE was nice in that I could select the text then just right-click it to print. I still had to hit the “selected text” radio button but it was workable. I’m glad to see that the choice is defaulted when text is selected by why not just go that one extra step to get two-click selected text printing?…
Simply add a “Print Selected” item on the right-click context menu of selected text in the browser that prints to the default printer without showing the print dialog. If you wanted to pick a printer, then you can right-click and select “Print” and have the “Selected Text” be the default but show the print dialog box for extra control.
Of course, with the right plugin, you CAN get this in Firefox now…
I’ve never really used the “print selected” option much, and I should. I hate it when various junk gets printed from web pages. The Firefox extension is working well for me now, just can’t believe it wasn’t available inherent with the browser.
RC 1 of IE 7 no longer “shrink to print.” Instead it chops off the right side of the text with the SCROLL BARS! Public Beta 1 and 2 printed just fine.
What happend!?